Good news from the sea: Ocean conservation success stories

Although most oceanic news is full of doom and gloom these days, there are a …

My last post from the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference looked at how the oceans are reacting to our changing climate, and it was all bad news. Unfortunately, "bad news" has become a trend when talking about the seas; ocean acidification, warming water, coral bleaching, floating garbage, pollution, or overfishing—if you can think of something bad, then it's probably happening in the water.

But one session at the AAAS meeting was able to shine a ray of sunlight into this otherwise gloomy vista. Surprisingly, the session was quite poorly attended; it was certainly one I was looking forward to, and I'd have thought that lots of others would show up too, if only because the idea of a conservation success story coming out of the present-day seas seems hard to fathom.

(Some) good news does exist, though, which is important for those working in the field, according to Dr Nancy Knowlton, one of the session's moderators. As Knowlton put it, students aren't interested in "writing ever-more extensive obituaries" on the oceans, so being able to point to successes ought to draw people into the field.

Haddock recovery

The first good news story involves the waters off New England, where coastal fisheries around the Georges Banks and other areas have been closed to fishing fleets. Haddock have been the real winners here, seeing a massive rebound in population, with small increases in yellowtail and cod.

The discrepancy between the relative rebound rates of different species has much to do with their reproductive differences; cod tend to breed about the same amount each year, whereas haddock can have the occasional bumper year. Since one of those bumper years was 2002, it meant the haddock got a real head start. Fishing pressure on cod has also declined much more slowly than it has on their fishy neighbors.

Interestingly, the period between 1995 and 2004, when the fisheries were closed, represents the longest period since 1900 that the Georges Bank hasn't been heavily overfished. Shutting it down was been a tricky venture, according to the University of New Hampshire's Dr. Andrew Rosenberg. Rather than managing fish stocks, scientists and government agencies are attempting to change human behavior by getting the fishermen to put their long-term interests ahead of more short-term ones.

Haddock aren't the only beneficiaries, though. Sea scallop biomass has steadily increased in the closed areas, which is a good measure of success, since scallops are immobile.

Long-term thinking

Next up was Greenpeace's John Hocevar, who put the situation with the oceans into some historical context. The last four hundred years of maritime policy has basically been a libertarian's paradise, ever since Hugo Grotius made his case in Mare Liberum that the high seas should be a free-for-all.

As a result of this attitude, early conservationist emphasis on the high seas started with a focus on pollution controls. In the 1970s, we dumped over 10 million tonnes of pollution into the open oceans each year. Starting with the London Convention of 1972, this was slowly reduced until dumping of industrial waste was finally ended in the early 1990s.

Attention then focused on the oceanic megafauna such as the great whales—and many of these species are now slowly recovering from the brink of extinction. Current efforts deal with the rampant overfishing that has become the equivalent of stripmining the seas. Although enforcement of controls like the 1992 UN ban on driftnets is somewhat patchy, individual nations are wising up to the need to safeguard marine resources for future generations. There has even been movement from retailers, with supermarket chains dropping high seas species that are considered to be in danger such as orange roughy, bluefin tuna, Greenland halibut, redfish, and Chilean sea bass.

According to Hocevar, piracy is still an issue, and he wasn't talking about oil tankers off the coast of Somalia. France and Italy are still engaged in pirate fishing of bluefin tuna, and the global problem remains large, with illicit catches estimated at between $10 billion and $23 billion a year.

On the whole, though, tuna can't really be counted as a success story. The regional fisheries management organizations are failing in their attempt to steward the species, although skipjack isn't doing too badly if you simply must have that tuna sandwich or order of sushi. Meanwhile, some countries are starting to call for a complete moratorium on northern bluefin fishing, and a number of Pacific nations have closed the holes between their territorial waters to tuna fishing.

Looking forward, managing the world's fish stocks in such a way that they're still around to be fished for future generations is going to require the sort of clever long term thinking that, thus far, we've not been too good at. Here's hoping we build on some of the efforts described by this panel.